Liberal "Tolerance"

Boy, what a mean-spirited treatise this Dave Lindorff piece is:

The area that will by completely inundated by the rising ocean - and not in a century but in the lifetime of my two cats - are the American southeast, including the most populated area of Texas, almost all of Florida, most of Louisiana, and half of Alabama and Mississippi, as well as goodly portions of eastern Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina. While the northeast will also see some coastal flooding, its geography is such that that aside from a few projecting sandbars like Long Island and Cape Cod, the land rises fairly quickly to well above sea level. Sure, Boston, New York and Philadelphia will be threatened, but these are geographically confined areas that could lend themselves to protection by Dutch-style dikes. The West Coast too tends to rise rapidly to well above sea level in most places. Only down in Southern California towards the San Diego area is the ground closer to sea level.

First of all, accepting the premise that a rising ocean will inundate anything (which I don't), it amazes me that Lindorff is content to see large swaths of America wiped out, while simultaneously protecting liberal enclaves in the northeast with dykes. He goes on to posit that the conservatives middle of the country will be wiped out by drought, and "right-wing retirement communities" in the southwest will be done in by rising energy costs.

The result of all this, according to Lindorff, will be a mass-migration of conservatives into liberal strong-holds. And he wants to make sure they stay in their place when they arrive:

The important thing is that we, on the higher ground both actually and figuratively, need to remember that, when they begin their historic migration from their doomed regions, we not give them the keys to the city. They certainly should be offered assistance in their time of need, but we need to keep a firm grip on our political systems, making sure that these guilty throngs who allowed the world to go to hell are gerrymandered into political impotence in their new homes.

Okay! The Lindorff plan is to assemble conservatives into some sort of ghetto, so they can't have any political representation. No fascism in that plan. And in the end, he can't help but throw a little personal invective in for good measure:

There will be much work to be done to help the earth and its residents - human and non-human - survive this man-made catastrophe, and we can’t have these future refugee troglodytes, should their personal disasters still fail to make them recognize reality, mucking things up again.

The arrogance is breathtaking. If you don't subscribe to Lindorff's political theories, you are a troglodyte. Moreover, Lindorff feels capable of actually saving the world with his politics. If he gets to dismantle democracy and capitalism in the process, so much the better. Unbelievable.

And if nothing much happens in the next few years, can we all say to Lindorff, "Shut up"? Undoubtedly, the left-wingers will have another trumped up crisis to bash conservatives with by then.